Amy Taylor had just dropped her satin boxing shorts to her knees to slap the bottom half of her silver string bikini when the stage invader appeared. Her rat-tailed blonde mop did a quick double-take stage left, she pulled up her shorts and ran at him like a truck. Luckily, security got to him first.

“I didn’t think that far ahead,” she says now, asked what she had in mind for the uninvited guest at the Music Bowl last year. “I would have figured it out when I got there.” She fails to stifle the kind of mischievous grin that’s launched a million school detentions.

Rock is an extreme sport for Amyl and the Sniffers. “Years ago, I tore the cartilage in me knee,” their spring-loaded singer reports without obvious regret. “I did my spine at the start of the year. I had to have a voice operation ’cause I got a cyst on my vocal cords from overuse.

“I think I’ll probably be a pretty crusty 40-year-old. But I’m one of those people that have my fingers crossed, like, ‘Come on scientists, let’s get some crazy medicine sorted’, then I’ll just get some DNA implanted in me and everything will grow back.”

Zooming in from another corner of Melbourne, Sniffers bassist Gus Romer doesn’t blink. He’s heard this sci-fi masterplan before, no doubt, in any number of sweat-and-bloodstained band rooms between here, Europe and the Americas.

Amyl and the Sniffers’ basic garage rock-and-rant formula hit another peak this last northern summer, climbing higher up the kind of festival bills that nail the zeitgeist or die. Their own headline shows there now average one or two thousand heads; five in London.

“Crowd wise, it was really cool,” Romer says. “I think the biggest one we did would have been around 10,000. Some of the shows were insane.” Asked to define insanity, it’s detention grins all round. “Declan [Martens] got aggressively shitfaced at a festival in Europe somewhere…”

Out of respect for the guitarist, we’ll leave it there. Just know, kids, that rock stars engage in alcohol-assisted tattoo sessions backstage so that you don’t have to. When all the inappropriately extended soloing and unprovoked audience abuse is over, they have a lovely new tour bus to pass out in while someone else finds their clothes.

“It definitely can take its toll,” Romer says, “but yeah, we got a bus and shit now and we got real solid crew people and that shit just makes it so much easier. It’s just made life so much better because they’re all f—in’ sick c—s and they f—in’ rule at what they do.”

All of which makes the band’s first shows back on home turf look kind of… modest. The bush village charm of Meeniyan Town Hall usually hosts hushed and seated Americana fans. The Sniffers’ first gig back home there sold out in hours. Frankston, Ballarat, Torquay and Warrnambool fell soon after.

The tour is under the Always Live banner, a post-COVID music industry initiative hatched by the late Michael Gudinski and the Victorian government. In its second year, the program highlights 165 artists over 60 events, from new local music to a Flemington Racecourse exclusive with Christina Aguilera.

“This is one of the tours I’m most looking forward to,” Taylor says of their seven shows, finishing on December 8 in Thornbury. “When I think of stuff I wanted to do when I started it was like, I want to play sweaty Aussie pub shows in regional places with hectic crew so shit yeah, I’m keen.”

The Victorian shows will be the last for the second Amyl and the Sniffers album, Comfort To Me, before they break to consider a third. Details of that are “top secret,” Romer says, though a radical musical shift is unlikely. Not to downplay the lads’ skill — drummer Bryce Wilson is the third piston in the ferocious machine — but this is a genre that values consistency, not innovation.

The challenge facing Taylor, documenting her real-life experience in the throes of an utterly unreal life experience, is arguably greater. “Worked at the IGA, now I’m a famous c—,” she cackled on Snakes. Other songs on Comfort to Me found her wrestling with accelerated evolution in many ways, from the hand of destiny in Guided By Angels to personal politics in Capital and the pressures of expectation in Choices.

Ultimately, in true punk fashion, she’s all about steamrolling defiance and self-empowerment. “I’m short I’m shy I’m f—ed up I’m bloody ugly/Get out of my way don’t touch me,” she howls in Freaks To The Front, a battle cry for misfits everywhere.

“I’m conscious, but I’m not too conscious,” she says of her accidental place as a mouthpiece for raging youth. “It’s one of those things where I just need to ease out the thinking. Because if I thought of that too much, it’d be confusing… I’m happy to help anyone who wants help, or inspire anyone who has been inspired, but it’s a weird thing to figure out.”

These are weird times for rock’n’roll, a physical medium in a strictly hands-off age. “Sweaty big dudes pushin’ everyone, punchin’ everyone and gettin’ real violent” was just what Taylor liked about her first gigs as a teenager growing up in peace-loving Mullumbimby, but that view drew its share of online indignation when she shared it four years ago.

“I still really love the high energy of a violent show,” she says. “The difference is I don’t want people to get hurt. I’m talking about consensual violence. I’m talking about a sweaty mosh pit, where everyone’s jumping up and down and giving each other shoves and shit. And nobody’s touching anybody who doesn’t want to be touched…

“I think it’s a really fun thing to be able to do that with live music. And I know that not everyone agrees to that. I just hope our shows are what they are. I hope there’s a space for everybody.”

Amyl and The Sniffers play Meeniyan Town Hall, Nov 24 (sold out); The Pier Bandroom Frankston (sold out), Nov 25; Volta Ballarat (sold out), Nov 26; Torquay Hotel (sold out), Dec 1; Dart & Marlin Warrnambool (sold out), Dec 3; The Cube Wodonga, Dec 5 and Thornbury Theatre Melbourne, Dec 8.